User blog:Dessertmonkeyjk/Keeping things tidy and consistent
I felt that the wiki could use abit of a makeover in terms of how things are organized and whatnot. Things such as articles being assigned to only 1-2 categories, ensuring a consistant format on articles (such as Competitor, Statistics, Drama, etc.), removing deadlinks are broken redirects, and all that jazz. There's quite abit to address here so I'll focus on one thing at a time. Artices & Categories As you know, articles can be assigned to one or more categories based on the content covered. What they're also for is for navigation of topics of interest by grouping them together onto one page. This makes it easier to find what the user is looking for without having to search for it. In fact, searching for it as being the only way to find an article page makes it harder for new users to find it. Categories themselves can also have a category assigned to them. You can think of them as a russian doll. For example, you can have the following hierarchy of categories and articles: Content© >> Tournament© >> I'm A Speedrunner Tournament Series© >> I'm A Speedrunner 5 (A) Content© >> Parodies© >> Parody Songs© >> Space Oddity (Parody) (A) While that is all well and good, due to this very reason it should be avoided for articles to be assigned to ALOT of categories. I advise only sticking to 3 categories per article max that summerizes the content of each article as a whole. No "One-off Competitors" or "IAS Veteren" or anything that is very specific to only a few articles. Keep it general and sparse. Standard Formatting When making articles that are of a similar nature such as Tournament or Competitor pages, it is easier to read articles that share a similar format and layout then those without. Why? Because if Competitor articles share a standard format, a user will know EXACTLY where to go for the information they are looking for. In fact, the Competitor pages are an excellent example. The layout that most but not all article have is this: Summery and Infobox, Tournament History, Tournament Statistics, Trivia. If a user was going through the competitor articles, potentially hopping from one to the next through links on articles, they would know where to find the information they're looking for more easily. Table Formatting Speaking of which, this also applies to tables in the way they are formatted in both layout and style. If you're new to editing in general or tend to stick to editing in Visual mode, you may be unaware of what I'm about to address here. First, here's a standard table... in source mode. Here it is again when rendered on a wiki page. It's not as complicated as it looks but if you want to know how the code works, then check this out. You can even make tables sortable by column and even collapsible. Why do I bring this up? Well, there are a few reasons. First, the table class defines the style of the table such as the color of specific rows and cells as well as borders. By default, creating a table using Visual mode will assign the class "article-table". This gives the table a soft color look as opposed to the harsh colors that of the one without a class. Second, it is advisable to set the width of the entire table as well as specific columns using a percentage instead of a fixed pixel size. The table above is using a percentage which causes it to dynamically resize to how big it appears on your monitor as well as making it easier to get the general size you want. In fact, go ahead and try resizing your window right now and you'll see what I mean. Third, you can do things per column or row more easily in Source mode then in Visual mode. For example, in the table above all the cells in the first row have their background color set to Salmon (which is shorthand in HTML for 250,128,114 in RGB). Now for the statistics tables on the competitor pages, they'll use a similar formatting which I will have to go through each and every one in order to do so. Conclusion I might as well stop for now since I have some editing to do on the Competitor articles based on what I brought up. For future reference though, consider keeping things more consistant and organized when you create articles. It'll help in the long run when many more articles of various kinds are added to the wiki so I hope you'll find this useful. Category:Blog posts